Re: [boost] question regarding assert and lightweight test

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-11-02 12:30:27

Robert Ramey:
> I've traced through the code with the gdb and seems to me
> that when assert is invoked, the program bails more or less
> immediatly without jumping back to the orginal main or
> invoking an exception that can be caught.  This results
> in tests which provoke assertions as being marked "passed".

assert should in principle call abort(), which should return a failure exit 
code to the OS, so the test should fail...

> Actually, this is unbelievable to me and I have to
> believe that I'm missing something really dumb.  I
> also took a cursory look at Boost Test code and don't
> see any special provision made for assert.
>
> Also I investigated BOOST_ASSERT.  It looks
> to me that this code is not conditional upon
> NDEBUG not being defined - that is that the
> code included by BOOST_ASSERT would
> still appear in a release build.  Again, I can't help but
> feel that I'm missing something really obvious.

BOOST_ASSERT works in three modes. By default, it maps to assert, and assert 
does obey NDEBUG. If BOOST_DISABLE_ASSERTS is defined, BOOST_ASSERT is 
compiled out. If BOOST_ENABLE_ASSERT_HANDLER is defined, failed asserts call 
a function that can be supplied by the user. So if your code uses 
BOOST_ASSERT, you can define a custom handler in your tests that prints a 
message and cause the test to fail.

http://www.boost.org/libs/utility/assert.html